72/365 Beware The Power of Moo Cow

I’m a believer in signs, or at least I think I am. I guess it depends on what kind of sign I think is presenting itself to me. For example, today I was getting into my car and when I turned the radio on there was a contest going on to win some sort of tickets. To win these tickets you had to correctly identify some song and it happened to be, “You Keep Me Hanging” by Vanilla Fudge. This normally would be without meaning but Vanilla Fudge happens to be the subject of one of the upcoming episodes for my internship that I currently have.

I took the song as a sign because I was on my way to an interview for another internship that I really want. An internship that pays, which is a step up from not being paid, and it would have me actively doing something five days a week. It seems like a jump but let me put some context around the situation. I graduated in May, and after traveling for a few months I came home ready for a job; surprise, surprise though because I couldn’t find one. By the time January rolled around I was feeling mildly depressed and at the end of my rope. I kept thinking, “please universe, please just send me something. I need a sign that everything is going to be okay.”

And it seemed when all hope was lost I got a phone call. It was the producer from the show I currently have an internship with now, an internship that I love and whose producers have been amazingly kind to me. When I truly felt desperate it seemed like the universe pushed this opportunity forward, as if it knew that this was the right time for this right thing. So when I heard the song today it made me feel like this was one of those opportunities being pushed forward when I again feel as if all the luck has been drained from my world.

My belief in signs is sort of similar to the belief of the great and powerful moo-cow. The concept of moo-cow was introduced to me while reading, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding. A memoir by Kristin Newman, which I must have already mentioned a hundred times by now but take it as a sign on how much I love this book. Kristin describes the moo-cow as, “when someone says something that you were completely sure only you had ever thought about. And which you then decide is a message from the universe that the two of you are supposed to be together forever.” If you want the full explanation you can read the book, but now whenever something happens that others see as coincidence I call it my moo-cow. It’s my sign from the universe that I’m supposed to do or not do something.

Now of course after I heard this affirmation from the radio I walked into the office feeling both confident and a little nervous. As I sat waiting for my interview to begin I took out a pen to take a few notes on questions I might want to ask when my pen began to leak all over my hands. RED INK. It looked like I had just got finished murdering someone, and I sat there panicked. Now of course I could have stood up to search for a bathroom, but I knew that my interview was going to start any second. And right as I finished using an old receipt to clean up some ink is when my name was called, shit. Was that the sign?

Was this the real moo-cow? Was I doomed to tank this interview? I walked out not knowing for sure how it went, but either way it seems I have some event to point to that should serve as the clue. Kristin would point this out as the danger of the moo-cow. We let signs get in the way of making decisions, or worse we let the supposed moo-cow make the choice for us. I like to believe the universe has a way of guiding us but maybe we give too much credit where it isn’t warranted. Leave yourself open to things to come, but don’t let the moo-cow distract you from what you really want and the work you need to put in to get there.